Subject: REVIEW: "Atlas Shrugged", Ayn Rand

From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan and Trevor" <[email-masked]>
Date: 17 Nov 1998 14:57:30 -0500

"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand
	Review Copyright 1998 Robert M. Slade

Ayn Rand is known as the darling of the right-wing crowd, as evidenced by
numerous jokes about the Monstrous Monolithic Multinational
MegaCorporation (and the drafting committee for the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment) with its daily readings from the works of Ayn Rand.  I was
somewhat surprised to note the adulation for Miss Rand that appears on the
net, given that most companies see the Internet as a haven of wild-eyed
lefties.  Initially I attributed this fan club to the recent surveys
indicating that netizens are a fairly fascist crowd after all, but having
been prompted to actually read some of this stuff I understand the
attraction.  Rand's work, in similar manner to "Terminal Compromise," is
geek wish fulfillment writ large.  In the case of "Atlas Shrugged," it is
very large indeed.  The book not only preaches that creating new things is
an automatic path to riches, but that *all* other human activities are
inessential.  This relegates to trivia such considerations as social
skills, etiquette, other people's feelings, any exertion outside of your
own narrow focus, and possibly even personal hygiene.  Sounds geek to me!

Rand's fictional works are formed (one hesitates to say "informed") by her
philosophy of objectivism.  The tenets of this dogma are a determination
on "objective reality" (seeing things as they are), logic, and an almost
fanatical devotion to capitalism.  Somehow, out of this mix, she
determines that selfishness is a moral imperative.  Objectivism seems to
be a rather desperate attempt to justify an ingrained fear of communism.
Only one of the ironies of Rand's work, life, and philosophy is the rigid
insistence that any thought should conform to objective reality coming
from a woman who only ever wanted to write fiction for a living and
married an actor.  The world of John Galt does not conform to any kind of
reality: scientific, social, fiduciary, or managerial.  Heck, I've even
worked on a railroad and that is *no* way to run one.  Early in the story
a P takes personal responsibility to order a train onto the main line
against a red light, thus ensuring that the Comet continues its unbroken
on-time record.  As any reader of the RISKS-FORUM Digest could tell you,
in real life the instant the passenger train hit the main track it would
collide with an eighty mile per hour extra carrying the only available
shipment of antitoxin for an epidemic in Chicago.

In regard to objective reality, I find an irresistible urge to digress
into Rand's view of nature.  She hates it.  Nature's only purpose is to
provide raw material for factories.  A beautiful park is only as good as
the crops you could grow on it once the trees were cut down.  Here in BC
we once had a politician refer to the cloying and unhealthy stench of pulp
mills as "the smell of prosperity," and Rand, with her endless belching
smokestacks, would be in full agreement with that position.  That contempt
has to flow from ignorance: on a night only twenty four hours after a full
moon the moonlight will easily be bright enough to walk down a railroad
track.  If I may be permitted a little armchair psychology, could it be
that the fact that any blade of grass has more fine detail than the most
skilled jeweller on earth could match is just too much competition?

This despite for nature extends to the human body.  These people live on
caffeine, nicotine, and fried cholesterol.  None seem to get more than a
few hours sleep per month [unlike the models of Ford, Edison, and
Churchill they don't make it up in naps] and there isn't even a pretence
of exercise.  There would be no need for them to "disappear:" in the real
world they would be dying off at an extraordinary rate.  If cancer didn't
get them, they would all, Type As that they are, be having coronaries
left, right, and sideways.

A central and vital element in Rand's philosophy is logic.  To a geek,
that sounds quite reasonable.  Logic is a fine tool.  To a philosopher, it
sounds a bit bizarre.  Logic is one of the four classical elements *of*
philosophy, so how do you found a new system of philosophy on it?  Indeed,
as Godel and his buddies found, there is an inherent contradiction in
attempting to create a system of logic that internally proves itself.
This came as a bit of a shocker to the mathematical world, and it put paid
to all those sci-fi stories where you give a supercomputer "1+1=2" and it
deduces the universe.  Rand does try to have the book exhaustively "prove"
her philosophy -- while I haven't timed it, I can well believe that Galt's
sixty page speech goes on for three hours.  However, the more obvious
problem is the simple internal inconsistency of it, as amply demonstrated
in the book.  Go ahead.  Try to reproduce Galt's speech in symbolic logic.
Logic?  Mr. Spock would have cat fits.  Well, no.  Of course Spock
wouldn't have cat fits.  Spock would raise one eyebrow and murmur
"Fascinating."  Which, in view of some of the passages of the book, is
fascinating.

The book has some beautiful and very moving tributes to persistence, hard
work, the fruits of the human mind, accomplishment against great odds, and
the joy of a job done superlatively rather than merely well.  The very
phrasing of the exchange of one's best efforts for the best efforts of
others has a poetry almost unheard of when speaking of commerce.
Unfortunately, it also has a great many very long passages of antagonistic
characters spouting pathetic garbage so that it can be knocked down by
Rand's heroes.  These protagonists (who for the purposes of this paper, we
will refer to as P) are capable, confident, productive, athletic, ruggedly
good looking (oh, sorry, Dagny), and pretty much universally rich.  They
are task-oriented and aggressive.  They are the "drivers" in many versions
of that particular personality grid, and they are at the outermost tip of
the quadrangle.  Rand's books are built on the conflict between the Ps and
the antagonists who, because ASCII can't do the little bar over the letter
designating "NOT," we will call P'.  P' characters are unproductive, lazy,
illogical, whining, hypocritical toadies who are generally also physically
loathsome.  The speech of a P' may reflect a kind of low cunning, but
generally they are incapable of forming complete and grammatical
sentences, and one suspects that they should not be let out on the streets
on their own lest they fall into the traffic.  It is these straw men who
turgidly attempt to express (or caricature) ideas that Rand disagrees
with, so that the Ps may wittily demolish them.

Ps are not geeks, or rather, most geeks are not Ps.  While task oriented,
geeks tend to the passive side of the scale.  However, this is where geek
wish fulfillment comes into play again.  Most geeks *wish* that they were
more aggressive, that they were the movers and the shakers.  Geeks would
love to have the impossible happen as it does in the book.  We have the
girl who, single-mindedly dedicating her life to running a railroad, when
she *does* go to the ball is not only the most naturally beautiful woman
there but, not having studied any of those things, is an expert on
cosmetics, conversation, dancing, fashion, and everything else that goes
into being the toast of the town.  When they all get to the P Shangri-La
to live happily ever after, everyone willingly turns their hands to all
kinds of mundane jobs, and they are all perfectly expert at them.  In the
real world, of course, geeks would be too single-focussed to have learned
anything about farming, sweeping, or plumbing, and Ps, of course, would
never have sat still long enough to learn any of it.

The character of the P is arbitrary and, despite the extreme insistence on
reason in all things, unreasoning.  One P character takes an
understandable dislike to a P', but out of all proportion to the offense,
and acts upon it in an indirect, useless, and unfair manner.  This action,
of course, is merely human, but it flies in the face of Rand's emotional
insistence on reason and logic in all things.  The insistence itself is
unreasonable, since any strong human drive, be it the will to create or
the love for a good woman, is emotional.  Logic does inform, but it
doesn't impel.

Rand also assumes that, since she can internally prove the validity of her
philosophy (mistake number one), all reasonable (qv logical) men (qv Ps)
will agree.  On pretty much anything.  BIG mistake.  Therefore, life among
the Ps is amicable and friendly, even among rivals for the same woman.
The importance and primacy of self-interest?  The book is positively
Buddhist in its abnegation of desires.

The concept of trust is handled very oddly.  One P character is asked to
trust another on the basis of no evidence at all, while a few pages later
yet another insists that he will not demand that the second take him "on
faith" despite a significant history of consistent behaviour.  Yet much of
the business of Ps seems to be conducted on a "handshake" basis.  On a
fourth hand, a P who prides himself on never breaking a promise has no
interest in keeping his vows to his wife, and seems to absolved from those
vows since his wife isn't, after all, a P.

Money, according to the P creed, is based on honour.  Ps would be much
happier with a gold standard, since gold has intrinsic value.  Since
gold's interesting electrical and corrosion resisting properties would not
seem to justify the value of the gold standard, particularly to a copper
refiner, I am at a loss to explain the logic underlying this statement.

Business operations are subject to rather incredible contradictions.
Inflating prices because you know your customer to be in need is
acceptable P behaviour.  Trading in information is not.  Making a profit
on someone else's lack of information is quite OK: a number of sharp deals
are cut where it is said that the buyers did not know what they had.
Putting pressure on someone is OK, but using political pressure is
justification for murder.  Nobody should use force against anyone else,
except one P does, but that is OK because his victims are of the P'
persuasion.  The question of fraud simply never arises, unless you think
that fraud is just a special case of ignorance on the part of the buyer,
which would make fraud quite OK.

Management is a bit of a problem.  It appears to be limited to barking
orders.  There are never any personnel difficulties, aside from a bit of a
labour shortage.  There is never any training.  In fact, the one person in
the entire book who tries to improve her situation commits suicide in the
end.  The pension plan isn't much better: the perfect, loyal, lifelong
employee is abandoned in the middle of nowhere.

Grand-sounding sermons are sprinkled liberally throughout the book.  With
yet more irony they preach logic, but appeal to emotions.  These diatribes
seem to be completely unaware of internal contradictions.  As only one
example, having shown a visitor that invention, commerce, and ownership
exist among the hidden Ps, their leader insists that they have among them
no invention, commerce, or ownership.

Both family and sexuality are rather hideously portrayed.  First, is it
ridiculous to call a woman a misogynist?  Rand seems to rail against the
"keep 'em barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen" mentality, but also
manages to put women very firmly in a subordinate position.  Sexual
activity (tame as it is) seems to be more of an "acquiescence to rape"
than any kind of romance.  One also suspects that Rand was into bondage,
considering a great many of the descriptions and comments.

Marriage vows in an objectivist church would probably run along the lines
of "Do you promise to attempt to dominate and subdue this woman until such
time as you grow bored?"  "Maybe."  "Close enough.  Do you promise to
applaud this man`s production until such time as you find someone with a
bigger ... corporation?"  "Whatever."  "By the power vested in me by
having scammed you guys out of a marriage license fee, I now pronounce you
man and appendage.  May you be unencumbered by small persons."  Having
almost no idea of Rand's family life I still feel confident in saying that
nobody who has ever actually raised children could ever talk about "the
virtue of selfishness" with a straight face.  I do understand that in
spite of the "Miss Rand" references she did get married at some point.
The discipline and self-sacrifice (oh, dear!) necessary to spend ten
years, part time, developing a new alloy is rather pallid beside the
investment made by any mother.  However, the objection never arises, since
almost nobody seems to have any children.  As a grandfather, I really have
to pity Galt and his friends.

But enough of the soft stuff, what about the technologies?  Railroads
dominate all, with no room for trucking, shipping, or air freight.  1957
wasn't *that* long ago.  We have superlatively hard alloys made chiefly of
soft elements.  The amount of oil you can remove from a given piece of
shale seems to be limited only by the imagination.  The fact that steam
engines can outpull diesel-electrics seems to have been forgotten.
Neglected aviation fuel tanks don't fractionally evaporate, and don't get
contaminated with water condensation.  Hidden valleys are possible in the
second most extensively mapped country in the world.  Visual cloaking
devices cover huge tracts of land.  Sound waves that can destroy bridges
at a range of a hundred miles don't damage the transmitter, but eventually
do.  Dozens, or even hundreds, of planes flit about the eastern seaboard
completely unnoticed.

Ah, but while I've been saying that this book is about geeks, in the end
it is the philosopher who lives happily ever after and the greatest
scientist of the age who dies a horrible death.  Well, it just so happens
that eight years before "Atlas Shrugged" was published, a fellow by the
name of Albert Einstein published a paper called "Why Socialism Works."
Too bad, because I am sure that Rand would have hated quantum theory as
much as Einstein did: God not playing dice with the universe and all that.
Except she would have disagreed about the God part.

The ultimate object in this book, and the one we return to time and time
again, is the motor: the "motor of the world" as we are repeatedly told.
More specifically, it is John Galt's motor.  And this is where we reach
both the final departure from objective reality, and the central
contradiction of Rand's philosophy.  The Ps, P values, and even the P
hideout itself are all dependent upon this magical motive power.  Those to
whom the very word "gift" is a hissing and a byword rely on a gift from
that oh so exploitable nature.  In direct violation of the laws of
thermodynamics, the great motor gets its power from "out of the air."

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%A   Ayn Rand
%C   10 Alcorn Ave, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario, M4V 3B2
%D   1957
%G   0-451-19114-5
%I   Penguin/Signet/Roc
%O   U$7.99/C$9.99/UK#6.99 416-925-2249 [email-masked]
%P   1074 p.
%T   Atlas Shrugged